In the intimate interplay between literature and visual arts, Italian artist duo Federica Patera and Andrea Sbra Perego cultivate a practice that resists easy categorization. Working from their Brooklyn based studio, the pair transforms language into tactile, textile-based works by stitching words and excavating verbal roots that then transform into monumental installations. You can currently find the artists's works at Scavolini SoHo Gallery with an exhibition titled The Way Words Turn, on view through October 17th, in the Design District of New York City. 

Join us in this Q&A as we hear first hand from the artists about how they approach the creation of their work, their interests in the origins of the world through a deconstruction of language and how they hope to leave their mark behind in our society. 
 

Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra perego. KAMA(DESIRE), 2026. REGENERATED NYLON YARN DERIVED FROM PRE AND POST INDUSTRIAL WASTE, METAL WIRE. 64 X 27 X 8 IN.  The Way Words Turn Exhibition Installation at Scavolini SoHo Gallery New York, Ny. September 17- October 17, 2026. 

Would it be too far of a reach to maybe also approach your work as one would an epic poem, or sonnet?

Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra Perego: We recognize our work in both comparisons. Our collaboration grew out of the meeting of literature and the visual arts, and the relationship between these two backgrounds continues to inform our practice. What interests us about poetry is its rhythm, the density of words, the magic it takes to translate a word or a line, and the possibility of building relationships through juxtapositions, repetitions, and pauses. In space, too, words can draw closer, interrupt one another, and echo across a distance.

If we had to choose between the two, though, we would feel closer to an epic poem than to the compact, self-contained nature of a sonnet. None of our projects is truly separate from the others, and none can be considered entirely finished. Perhaps that is also why the word “project” has never felt quite right to us. We might think of them as chapters in a larger narrative that is still unfolding, in which themes, forms, and words recur, transform, and take on new meanings.

More specifically, the reference to epic poetry evokes a cosmogonic dimension that figures prominently in our research. With Roots, for example, we explore the relationship between language and origins, between the act of naming and things coming into being. In many great mythological narratives, the birth of the universe and the gods establishes the world in which the deeds of heroes and people later play out, making the analogy with an epic poem particularly fitting.

Finally, there is the fundamental question of time. Reading and writing unfold in a sequence: one word follows another, and meaning develops along the way. In our work, this temporality meets the visual and physical presence of the artwork. Time is also what it takes to make it: shaping, wrapping, and sewing become gestures through which words take on a body. We like to think that something of this duration can reach the viewer, inviting them to linger and enter the work gradually, rather than in a single instant, and that the work can remain an ongoing discovery.

Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra perego. EACH OTHER, 2026. REGENERATED NYLON YARN DERIVED FROM PRE AND POST INDUSTRIAL WASTE, METAL WIRE. 73 X 42 X 12 IN.  The Way Words Turn Exhibition Installation at Scavolini SoHo Gallery New York, Ny. September 17- October 17, 2026. 

Turning words and letters into textile arts, seems key to your practice, while thinking of the larger works, dependent upon a wall for display, I cannot help but then make some connections with cave painting and ancient inscribing in letters that are foreign to most - Thinking of the works like this - can we say that part of the goal is to leave a mark on society? And if so - what is it that you want to leave?
 

FP & ASP: The connection with ancient inscriptions and cave paintings interests us very much, especially because it carries the idea of something capable of outlasting the conditions in which it was made. We can encounter that mark centuries later, sense its presence, and recognize a gesture within it. Even when its meaning is no longer fully accessible to us, it remains there, still, waiting to be observed, questioned, perhaps only partly deciphered.

More than leaving a personal mark on society, though, we are interested in rediscovering traces that already exist and that, in some way, predate even the historical and social forms through which we encounter them. Our work often has an archaeological component: we look for common elements across languages, eras, cultures, and different systems of signs, something that changes form but keeps resurfacing. This is therefore more than an inquiry into the past; it is a search for architectures, pathways, and relationships that seem to elude the fluctuations of the present and the arbitrariness of particular conventions.

For us, verbal roots are traces of this kind. They are small treasure chests of stories: following a word means observing how its meaning has changed, what encounters it has had, and what connections it retains with seemingly distant words. In this sense, language becomes a kind of layered terrain we can excavate.

We are fascinated by that almost timeless dimension in which a sign seems to hold something that is not immediately available. There is a mystery created by our own distance from that sign, a distance that generates energy. Not everything has to be revealed right away; not everything has to be immediately legible or decipherable.

When we think about what we would like to leave, then, it is less a single, unequivocal message than the possibility of recognizing connections to build on. Words participate in the construction of reality, and the way we use them has consequences: when they have no grounding in fact, for example, they can open the door to deception. Devoting time and attention to them, making them perceptible again through matter, also means momentarily withdrawing them from the speed, simplification, and distortions of the present. We want the work to continue to exist as an open trace, capable of holding questions and relationships: an archaeology of the perpetual present.

Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra perego. WASH, 2026. FABRIC MADE FROM PRE- AND POST- CONSUMER WASTE, METAL WIRE. 18 X 12 X 16 IN.  The Way Words Turn Exhibition Installation at Scavolini SoHo Gallery New York, Ny. September 17- October 17, 2026. 

How do you choose the texts that you then turn into textile artworks?   

FP & ASP: Reading is an integral part of our process. Our collaboration began with RAR, an archive of quotations drawn from different literary texts and gathered through analogy. As we read, we identify fragments that can enter into a relationship with others: an image, a thought, or a word opens up a connection, even between authors and eras far removed from one another. Reassembling these fragments gives rise to new narratives that may no longer have anything to do with the original texts. For us, this was also a kind of practical demonstration of a work’s ability to move beyond the circumstances in which it was created and, consequently, to acquire a degree of independence from its maker. The sentences were detached from their original contexts and treated like words, which belong to no one and have no author. In this sense, reading already becomes a form of writing.

The choice therefore concerns not only what a text says, but also the possibilities it holds: what it can generate when it encounters other words, a material, a space, or another era. Very often, the books themselves also point us toward what to read next. One author leads to another, a word opens up a genealogy, a quotation becomes the threshold of a new path. We move through literature in this way, allowing ourselves to be guided by the connections that emerge in the process.

Alongside literature, we are also very interested in linguistics, understood broadly. We approach it less as a discipline concerned with “speaking a language correctly” than as a way of understanding how the faculty of language works, how languages are built, how they change, and what relationships they retain over time. It is especially in ancient languages—we prefer not to call them “dead”—that we find a particular density of correspondences. We are fascinated by the way connections, shifts, and enduring traces emerge behind the seemingly mechanical structure of language, appearing to exceed its purely communicative function. Here, too, as we mentioned earlier, we are interested in seeking something that cannot be fully accounted for in historical terms.

For Roots, our point of reference is Elémire Zolla’s essay “Language and Cosmogony,” which explores not only the connections between different, distant languages, but also how a map of the stages of Creation can be reconstructed from verbal roots. We like to imagine that the relationships between words and the meanings that develop from a shared root each trace a different outline of the same form, somehow abstract and primordial.

In other cases, the project itself leads us toward a particular voice. For Since We Spoke, for example, we worked with Phillis Wheatley’s poems, reassembling fragments into a new letter. The dialogue with writing therefore varies each time: sometimes it begins with a constellation of texts, sometimes with a single voice, and sometimes with a word and the history it holds. But what we seek in all these cases is to allow something to emerge that goes beyond the individual circumstance, the individual author, or the historical dimension treated as the ultimate measure and defining context.

Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra perego. DANCE, 2026. REGENERATED NYLON YARN DERIVED FROM PRE AND POST INDUSTRIAL WASTE, METAL WIRE. 83 X 30 X 28 IN.  The Way Words Turn Exhibition Installation at Scavolini SoHo Gallery New York, Ny. September 17- October 17, 2026. 

How do you see your work - as an extension of the original text, or standing on its own?

FP & ASP: One of our works began with a reflection by Paul Valéry that Borges quotes in “Coleridge’s Flower,” in Other Inquisitions. Valéry suggested that books could exist in relation to one another without the need to name their authors or recount the circumstances of their lives, because, to paraphrase, the books could in some way be traced back to a Universal Spirit.

This is a perspective we feel very close to, especially in a climate of increasing manipulation of the self—and it is no accident that there are two of us. We like to let the books—the works—carry on their own conversation.

Both conditions can therefore coexist. The text brings a history, a voice, and a set of relationships into the artwork. As it enters a new composition, it also begins to produce, or reveal, other meanings. It is a little like words that grow from the same root: each acquires a meaning of its own, a denotation, we might say, but its connotations, the meanings held by its sister words, do not disappear—ever.

The transition into material form also introduces further transformations: scale, weight, the texture of the fabric, the stitching, and the distance between words all contribute to what the work communicates. A sentence we could follow across a page can occupy a wall, bend, become intertwined, or require us to move our bodies to follow it.

Our work therefore acquires its own autonomy while retaining a relationship with what it grew out of. Knowing the source opens up another path of interpretation, but the encounter can also happen through form, material, technique, or a word someone recognizes.

We pay particular attention to symbols and their ability to hold the literal and the metaphorical together. This interest guides the making of our work because, where these two dimensions merge, something takes shape that calls for care, a certain sense of ceremony, if we are to grasp it—and that, as Edgar Wind observes, risks dissolving when we try to define it directly. That something is what we focus on. It’s like holding a foundational secret. 

Federica Patera & Andrea Sbra perego. THE RISING, 2026. REGENERATED NYLON YARN DERIVED FROM PRE AND POST INDUSTRIAL WASTE, METAL WIRE. 87 X 22 X 23 IN.  The Way Words Turn Exhibition Installation at Scavolini SoHo Gallery New York, Ny. September 17- October 17, 2026. 

Going completely ‘left field’ does Ferdinand de Saussure factor in your works in anyway - considering: sign/ signifier/signified?

FP & ASP: The distinction between signifier and signified certainly offers a way of reading our work. We are interested in what happens in the relationship between a word, the form through which we perceive it, and the concept it points to.

When we make a word out of fabric, its physical presence, the material we use, the time we spend, and the other words we place alongside it all contribute to the production of meaning. A word can become unwieldy, fragile, tangled; it can be immediately recognizable or require time to decipher. These conditions affect how we encounter and understand it.

In our work with verbal roots, meanings accumulate, disappear, and undergo translation: halos of meaning form around the passages from one language to another, bringing new and unexpected details to light. In some traditions, ancient and otherwise, the numerical values of letters and the pictograms associated with them also come into play. Then there is the history of how one letter became another, within the same alphabet or in the transition to a different linguistic and cultural system.

We try to make this movement perceptible. The word becomes a place where form, meaning, and material act together. This is one of the reasons we keep returning to language: to trace the creative power that resides within it.